Ghosts
by Sojourner Ahebee
for semilore
california’s first rain in months & two black girls biking down the wet earth
semilore carries knuck if you buck on her tongue the whole ride, says black
people like rap so much because it is release,
sometimes the beat falls from our black mouths like a howl, the pink of our tongues
blooming in a dark room,
where no one thought it would & how we open a wound
and make garden out of it, how we part the sea
with our teeth where an ancestor might have
jumped from a ship into, how we do it with language
& the ocean’s salt stains our words white.
ghost me this way:
with our music keeping us closer than the way they packed us on ships
with my mouth perpetually open like a wet rose,
songing a scream
with my hair plaited & greased down by grandma’s hands
with the magnolia always in bloom like grandma’s hands
as she plucked cotton from the root in her youth, or mended
a shirt a wound on my leg,
as she turned the steering wheel and drove
aimlessly for hours for all the time
women like her were refused mobility. Grandma presses
a foot to the gas & a slave girl comes alive inside of her, trying to move, wanting
to be so close to us
& semilore’s voice is somewhere in that in between, the lyric cutting itself in half
to cut across time like a wet
blade & california turning two black girls into water,
our shirts sticking to our backs so close to us we want to be so close to us
california’s first rain in months & two black girls biking down the wet earth
semilore carries knuck if you buck on her tongue the whole ride, says black
people like rap so much because it is release,
sometimes the beat falls from our black mouths like a howl, the pink of our tongues
blooming in a dark room,
where no one thought it would & how we open a wound
and make garden out of it, how we part the sea
with our teeth where an ancestor might have
jumped from a ship into, how we do it with language
& the ocean’s salt stains our words white.
ghost me this way:
with our music keeping us closer than the way they packed us on ships
with my mouth perpetually open like a wet rose,
songing a scream
with my hair plaited & greased down by grandma’s hands
with the magnolia always in bloom like grandma’s hands
as she plucked cotton from the root in her youth, or mended
a shirt a wound on my leg,
as she turned the steering wheel and drove
aimlessly for hours for all the time
women like her were refused mobility. Grandma presses
a foot to the gas & a slave girl comes alive inside of her, trying to move, wanting
to be so close to us
& semilore’s voice is somewhere in that in between, the lyric cutting itself in half
to cut across time like a wet
blade & california turning two black girls into water,
our shirts sticking to our backs so close to us we want to be so close to us
Sojourner Ahebee writes poems about African diaspora identities and the eternal question of home and belonging. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Winter Tangerine Review, For Harriet, and featured by The Academy of American Poets. In 2013 she served the United States as a National Student Poet, the nation’s highest honor for youth poets creating original work. She was invited to the White House by former First Lady Michelle Obama to receive her award. Her debut poetry chapbook, Reporting from the Belly of the Night, was released in August 2017. She calls Philadelphia and Abidjan home.